A message from Town Supervisor Rick Keaveney

To Fellow Canaan Residents and Visitors:

Welcome to the Town of Canaan Website. Our Website is a place where residents, future residents and visitors can easily access current information about our Town.

We are a Town of less than 1,800 residents, a rural community with pastoral settings, agricultural and artistic specialties, and small businesses. We are gifted with creative, resourceful and dependable residents. We have a unique quality of life unmatched in most places and we are proud of maintaining this quality of life.

Our goal should be to leave our Town in better shape than we found it financially, socially and environmentally. We need to significantly improve communications between Town officials and with residents, focus on maintaining the high quality of services we expect and improve areas that need attention, address extraordinary issues facing Canaan promptly and cost-effectively, listen to residents, officials, employees, and volunteers and treat everyone with respect, and more importantly, encourage and support the basic foundation of our Town, which is volunteerism.

The management of a small town has nothing to do with politics or prejudices, but it has everything to do with participation. As a small town we have the irreplaceable advantage of exercising democracy in its purist form as frequently as we want. As a community, if we wish to maintain our quality of life, then events which may improve or compromise this quality of life in other neighborhoods or other roads in our Town should be important to all of us. We are all in this together.

I have one final word about leadership. Leadership is not about making unilateral decisions. It is all about listening and achieving consensus or compromise to make the best decisions for our community. I need your involvement to make Canaan work and insure the quality of life we all know and love.

I wish you the best year you have ever had in 2008.

Rick Keaveney
Town Supervisor

Questions? Suggestions? Use Contact the Town.

Town Hall:
The Canaan Town Hall can be found on County Route 5, just south of the intersection with Route 295. The mailing address is PO Box 459, Canaan, NY 12029.

The Canaan Town Clerk's hours are:

Monday & Wednesday & Thursday & Friday from 9:30 AM to 2:30 PM
Thursday 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM

The Clerk's office can be reached at (518)781-3144, ext. 1. If you have a question about the town, the Clerk probably has the answer! So give her a call or feel free to stop by.